Penny Arcade Seeks Kickstarter Funds To Go Ad-Free

Gaming webcomic Penny Arcade has figured out an interesting use for crowdfunding site Kickstarter. By accumulating enough donations, they hope to remove all of the advertisements from their site.

"I don’t want you to get the idea that Penny Arcade is any kind of trouble. Honestly if this Kickstarter doesn’t work nothing here will change," Penny Arcade artist Mike Krahulik said on the webcomic's blog. "The reality is that we can continue working for advertisers but if we can, we’d rather work for you."

If fans pony up $525,000, the main page of Penny Arcade will be completely ad-free for a year. If the Kickstarter drive reaches $999,999, ads will be removed from every part of the site for the year. You'll be troubled no longer by the advertisements for...the game based on Penny Arcade, or the card game inspired by a Penny Arcade strip. It is pretty terrible, after all, to be shown ads for things you probably want anyway.

If this was just about ads, though, I'd rather keep my money. My brain is trained at this point to ignore the top and side banners of the Penny Arcade homepage. However, there's an interesting twist to the Kickstarter drive: bonus site content. For example, if the site raises $550,000, Mike and Jerry will make a 6-page Lookouts strip. At $825,000, the DLC Podcast will be brought back to life.

Thus far, Penny Arcade's experiment appears to be working. They've raised $105,000 since the fundraising drive went live earlier today.